EPO and Russia sign agreement on machine translation of patents

Moscow/Munich, 16 May 2012 -- The European Patent Office
(EPO) and the Federal Service for Intellectual Property (Rospatent) have agreed
to enhance cooperation in the promotion of innovation by enabling machine
translation of patents from and into Russian. Under the Agreement signed in Moscow today, Rospatent
and the EPO will exchange full-text versions of patent documents in Russian and
English to create bilingual text corpora for use in the free Patent Translate
service on the EPO's website.

"For the first time in the history of the European patent system
Russian-language patents will be made available to the users This agreement
breaks new ground in the relationship between the EPO and Russia," said EPO President
Benoît Battistelli. "It will bring the wealth of technology contained in
patents to the fingertips of innovators in both our regions, removing language
as a delimiting factor," he said.

"The information function of patents cannot be rated high enough.
Innovation is a global market, and by making their respective collections of
patent documents accessible to researchers, scientists and inventors in Russian
and English, the EPO and Rospatent significantly contribute to strengthening
the innovation process both in their regions and at worldwide level. Especially
small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as research institutions, stand to
benefit from this improved access to information on new technologies,"
President Battistelli stated.

"This agreement will facilitate the filing of patent applications by
Russian companies in the rest of Europe and by European companies in Russia,"
said Boris
Simonov, Director General of Rospatent. "This in turn will lead
to further innovation in our two regions."

The enhanced relationship between Russia and the EPO is reflected in
the trends in recent filing figures. For example, applications filed by
companies from EPO member states with the Russian patent office saw an increase
by approximately 10% from 2010 to 2011. The number of applications filed by
Russian inventors and companies at the EPO in 2011 was up 19% on the previous
year.

About the Federal Intellectual Property Service (Rospatent)

The Federal Service for Intellectual Property (Rospatent) is a
federal executive authority performing functions of control and supervision in
the area of the legal protection and exploitation of intellectual property
rights, including patents and trademarks.

About the EPO

The European Patent Office (EPO) is one of the largest intergovernmental
institutions in Europe, with almost 7 000
employees. Its headquarters are in Munich and it
has offices in Berlin, Brussels,
The Hague and Vienna. The EPO was founded with the aim of
strengthening co-operation between the European states in the field of
invention protection. Through the EPO's centralised patent granting procedure, inventors
are able to obtain patent protection in the 38 member states of the European
Patent Organisation.